News & Updates

Bruce Vogt felt the best way to honour his late brother, Gordon Vogt, Arts’70, MA’73, was by combining two things he loved — film and music.

A special naming ceremony for the new Gordon Vogt Film Screening Room took place on Oct. 2 at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Those in attendance heard many memories about Gordon, who died of cancer at the age of 38.

Bruce Vogt’s interpretations of Liszt’s piano works have been praised internationally. In this concert, Vogt will delight the audience with a program of the composer’s music from his early touring years to his late futuristic works.

As both performer and scholar, Vogt has had a special interest in Liszt since 1980, the year he began teaching in the University of Victoria’s School of Music. (He is currently a professor, and has been head of the piano department since 1991.) Liszt’s music, he has said, liberated him as a pianist, and Liszt remains the composer with whom he is most closely associated.

It was 1981, and after performing on a derelict piano at Merritt Secondary School, Bruce Vogt decided the Nicola Valley was in need of something a little more “grand.”

In donating the proceeds of his show that year to the Nicola Valley Arts Council, Vogt kickstarted a fund that would eventually blossom into the C7F Grand Piano which now occupies the Merritt Civic Centre.

Reviews

TECHNICAL PERFECTION PAIRED WITH EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVENESS compositions from Mozart, Chopin, Liszt resounded with seldom-heard perfection... What is apparent in his playing is the joy he takes in giving to others what he has so dazzlingly mastered..." Usinger Anzeiger, ALTWEILNAU, GERMANY

"RARE GRANDEUR...I have never heard [Liszt's] Norma Fantasy played with such consummate largesse...I was mesmerized by Vogt's sheer control. In Liszt's Dante Sonata the structure of the work was never exposed and the final triumph of the piece rang from the piano with spine chilling inevitability." The Times, LONDON, ENGLAND

"CONCERT OF THE YEAR... Splendidly subtle readings. Vogt made us listen to music that we might have missed, and some familiar items which we heard anew."

"...THOUGHTFUL AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING. The sophisticated yet ungimmicky presentation left the dry didacticism of lecture-recitals in the dust." The Globe and Mail, TORONTO, CANADA

"MELANCHOLY MAGIC - Vogt's concentrated pianistic command is to be respected along with his great empathy for poetic mood; he was able to draw from a great reserve of power without placing this power in the foreground." Frankfurter Allgemaeine Zeitung, FRANKFURT, GERMANY